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About This Role
Position
Email \& SMS Marketing Specialist
About ACE Scholarships
ACE is a 501(c)(3\) non\-profit, founded in 2000 in Denver, Colorado, to provide low\-income children with equal access to quality K\-12 private schools through partial scholarship support. Over the past 25\+ years, ACE has delivered more than 140,000 scholarships worth over $390 million. This school year, ACE is serving approximately 16,000\+ children in Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming, and is actively pursuing other expansion opportunities with the support of a national funding partners. ACE is actively preparing for the Federal School Choice Tax Credit Program which comes into effect January 2027, which will open the floodgates of school choice for hundreds of thousands of students across the country. For more information visit the ACE website at?www.acescholarships.org.?
Our Mission is to advance K\-12 educational freedom, with a focus on securing financial support for families so they may access the quality education of their choice.
Our Values:
ACE Founding Principles: Our founding principles are the foundation of ACE and our North Star. We honor ACE’s founders by remaining committed to these principles, and we passionately advocate for the Mission and Vision these principles support.
Accountability: We embrace personal responsibility by taking ownership of our work and focusing on results. We expect both to give and to receive honest feedback.
Innovation: We know ideas matter. We prefer the risks and rewards the come with creativity, to the certainty that attends stagnation.
Adaptability: We position ourselves to take advantage of opportunities, embracing strategic and operational change when it makes our work more impactful.
Optimism: We believe our best days are ahead, and we embrace a forward\-thinking mindset. We will make mistakes, but we will remain cheerful in the face of adversity and give people the benefit of the doubt.
Kindness: We value everyone on our team, respect differences and trust one another. This requires courage and strength, as it involves celebrating and giving our undivided attention to others.
Our Founding Principles:
- The American public education system is flawed
- Free enterprise and
- democracy work
- Parents know the best education environment for their kids
- Private schools offer great value and have open seats
- All people are created equal and deserve an equal chance to pursue the American Dream
Position Overview
ACE Scholarships seeks a strategic, creative, and mission\-aligned Email \& SMS Marketing Specialist to lead and optimize our multi\-channel messaging efforts using ActiveCampaign as the primary platform. With prior experience managing email (and SMS) strategies in a fast\-paced, mission\-driven environment. You will oversee donor stewardship, family/applicant engagement, impact storytelling, and fundraising appeals. This role will manage the full lifecycle of email and SMS campaigns, drive higher engagement and conversions, ensure compliance, and integrate messaging to support our organizational goals in the education\-reform space.
Primary Job Responsibilities
Email Marketing
- Develop and execute integrated email and SMS marketing strategies across stakeholder audiences (donors, families, scholarship applicants, schools) and donor/funder lifecycles (acquisition, cultivation, retention, major gifts, recurring support)
- Write compelling, on\-brand copy for emails and SMS messages, including strong subject lines, short\-form text content, calls\-to\-action, and personalized messaging that inspires action (donations, applications, event RSVPs, shares)
- Manage audience segmentation in ActiveCampaign. Build and maintain clean lists, segment by criteria (e.g., giving history, geography, engagement level, application status), ensure list hygiene, grow subscribers ethically, and comply with CAN\-SPAM, TCPA, GDPR, A2P 10DLC, and other regulations
- Design, build, test, and deploy campaigns using ActiveCampaign. Create responsive templates, set up automations/workflows (welcome series, donation thank\-yous, impact updates, year\-end appeals, urgent fundraising pushes), implement A/B testing, personalization, dynamic content, and multi\-channel sequences (email \+ SMS triggers)
- Collaborate with web development team to ensure all contact forms are properly integrated with ActiveCampaign for lead conversion
- Develop appropriate subscriber marketing funnels
Text Message Marketing
- Lead SMS strategy specifically:
- Obtain and validate opt\-ins (double opt\-in where possible), manage consent and opt\-outs (automated STOP handling).
- Send high\-engagement SMS broadcasts and MMS (with images for added impact).
- Develop use cases such as urgent fundraising appeals, event reminders, coordination, real\-time impact updates, text\-to\-give campaigns, and two\-way conversations (e.g., keyword responses for donor questions or application support).
- Set quiet hours, monitor deliverability, and track high open rates (typically 98–99%) to drive timely action without overwhelming supporters.
Operations \& Collaboration
- Coordinate closely with organizational partners, state teams, development, scholarship programs and external vendors
- Track performance metrics, analyze insights and deliver regular reports and recommendations to leadership on engagement, growth and ROI
- Monitor, analyze, and report on performance metrics for both channels (open/click\-through/conversion rates, unsubscribe rates, revenue attributed, SMS engagement/response rates)
- Ensure all content complies with nonprofit best practices, brand guidelines and platform policies.
- Collaborate with marketing, development/fundraising, programs, and communications teams to align messaging with broader campaigns, events, press releases, social media and storytelling
- Own the ongoing optimization and best practices within ActiveCampaign: maintain platform setup, troubleshoot issues, implement AI\-assisted content generation (where available), and train team members on usage as needed
- Stay current on email/SMS trends, nonprofit best practices, deliverability standards, compliance, and platform updates to maximize ROI and supporter experience
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Exceptional writer and storyteller who can translate complex policy and data into emotionally resonant, shareable content.
- Strategic thinker with hands\-on execution style
- Collaborative team player who can coordinate across departments and with external partners
- High emotional intelligence and ability to represent the organization with professionalism and warmth
- Able to balance structure with agility in a fast\-moving environment
- Comfort working within conservative or religious partner environments.?
- Thrives in a startup\-like environment and embraces ambiguity.?
Requirements
- 4\-6 years of hands on experience in email marketing, with demonstrated success managing strategies and campaigns (preferably in nonprofit, education, advocacy, political/ issue\-based or fundraising organizations)
- Proficiency in ActiveCampaign (or similar ESP like MailChimp, Klaviyo) for email automation, segmentation, workflows, and reporting
- Familiarity with SMS marketing principles, compliance (TCPA, 10DLC, opt\-in/opt\-out), and best practices for high\-engagement, permission\-based texting
- Strong copywriting skills. Ability to create persuasive, emotionally resonant, concise content tailored to segmented audiences through email and ultra\-short SMS formats
- Experience with list management, A/B testing, automation, analytics, and basic HTML/CSS for email customization
- Prior experience integrating email and SMS in a unified strategy (e.g., cross\-channel automations, triggered SMS follow\-ups to email opens)
- Knowledge of nonprofit fundraising tactics (year\-end appeals, peer\-to\-peer, text\-to\-give, recurring giving)
- Familiarity with CRMs (Salesforce, Bloomerang) and integrations with ActiveCampaign
- Basic graphic design skills (Canva, Adobe) for email/SMS visuals (MMS images)
- Understanding of Google Analytics, tracking, or ROI attribution for multi\-channel campaigns
- Comfort in a collaborative, fast\-paced nonprofit environment with a focus on measurable mission impact
- Strong alignment with ACE’s mission, values, and founding principles.
- Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, Communications, English, Marketing, other related fields, or equivalent working experience
- Knowledge of education policy and current events in K\-12 space (preferred, but not required)
- Experience working in a national or multi\-state organization (preferred, but not required)
Location, Travel, and Reporting
- This an in\-office role in Denver Tech Center office, remote work during travel periods and as approved by manager
- Reports to Marketing Leadership
- 0\-5% travel throughout the year
FLSA Status
Full\-time, Exempt
Compensation
Annual salary of $65,000 \- $75,000 and eligible for annual performance bonuses, plus benefits package, which includes but is not limited to:
- Medical Insurance (with generous employer contribution)
- Dental Insurance (with generous employer contribution)
- Vision Insurance
- Voluntary Life Insurance
- HSA, FSA, Limited FSA, and Dependent Care FSA pre\-tax spending accounts
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- Free, Employer\-paid Short\-term, Long\-term, and AD\&D insurance.
- 401(k) with 6% employer match with immediate vesting
- Monthly cellphone stipend
- Scholarships for employee’s whose children are actively enrolled in a K\-12 private school ($3,500/child, up to $10,500/year).
- On\-site amenities in Colorado Home Office including employer paid parking, gym, cafe, and building security, and in\-office coffee and snack bard, and walking treadmill.
Salary Context
This $65K-$75K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $100K across 15465 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At ACE Scholarships, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $166,983 based on 13,781 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $131,300. This role's midpoint ($70K) sits 58% below the category median. Disclosed range: $65K to $75K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Architect ($292,900). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.
ACE Scholarships AI Hiring
ACE Scholarships has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Greenwood Village, CO, US. Compensation range: $75K - $75K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 7% (1,863 positions) offer remote work, while 24,200 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: Los Angeles (1,695 roles, $178,000 median); New York (1,670 roles, $200,000 median); San Francisco (1,059 roles, $244,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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